Managing knowledge wisely: A case study in organisational behaviour

Essvac, a subsidiary of Archer Pharmaceuticals Ltd., is a capital-intensive organization, but, nevertheless, employs a number of knowledge workers. Henry Blake is such a knowledge worker. He is more experienced in vaccine R&D production and quality control than anyone else in the entire AP Group. He will be retiring in 18 months, and there are no systems in place to retain his knowledge for the organization. Furthermore, it is generally accepted that Blake's knowledge will be lost. Over the years, he has disseminated much of his knowledge to a number of individuals. This could be seen as a way of preserving the knowledge within the organization, but the organizational culture has led to this knowledge being internalized by the recipients and used as a component of their own individual power bases for the purposes of control and defense. Organizational knowledge tends to reside at the individual level, which results in poor feedback systems and very little production of new knowledge. Knowledge is not recognized as a manageable resource by any level of the organizational management. There is a basic unwillingness to learn at the senior level, although there is recognition of the need for learning and change at middle management level and below. The organizational culture is seen to be a major barrier to both organizational and individual learning and is enforced from the top. Planned development is resisted, although AP has been recently forced to restructure in response to environmental pressures. A study is presented that suggests that a corrosive approach from within the management hierarchy could lead to change, although this would be extremely slow.